We speak with President Jefferson this week about death and suicide, specifically about the deaths of Meriwether Lewis, James Hemmings and Alexander Hamilton.
After the death of his wife in 1782, Jefferson wrote, “All my plans of comfort and happiness reversed by a single event and nothing answering in prospect before me but a gloom un-brightened with one cheerful expectation. This miserable kind of existence is really too burdensome to be borne, and were it not for the infidelity of deserting the sacred charge left me, I could not wish its continuance a moment.”
We are joined this week by David Nicandri, one of the most respected Lewis and Clark scholars in the country. His book, "River of Promise: Lewis & Clark on the Columbia" fills a significant gap in our understanding of Lewis and Clark’s legendary expedition. Nicandri joins us not so much to speak of that journey, but one of his own. In a fascinating conversation, Nicandri tells us about the journey he and his son took on the Dempster Highway all the way to the arctic ocean.
"He was iconic in the world's idea of what a nation could possibly be, and what an enlightened leader could possibly be."
— Clay S. Jenkinson portraying Thomas Jefferson
We discuss Humboldt and Jefferson: A Transatlantic Friendship of the Enlightenment by Sandra Rebok, which explores the relationship between two fascinating personalities: the Prussian explorer, scientist, and geographer Alexander von Humboldt and Thomas Jefferson. They met in the spring of 1804 for just a few days, but their correspondence went on for decades.
Nobody has ever put forward the slightest piece of credible evidence that Lewis was murdered.
We speak with President Jefferson this week about death and suicide, specifically about the deaths of Meriwether Lewis, James Hemmings and Alexander Hamilton.